Boa: a link between worlds

The business models of software/platform as a service have contributed to developers dependence on the Internet. Developers can rapidly point each other and consumers to the newest software changes with the power of the hyper link. But, developers are not limited to referencing software changes to one another through the web. Other shared hypermedia might include links to: Stack Overflow, Twitter, and issue trackers. This work explores the software traceability of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) which software developers leave in commit messages and software repositories. URLs are easily extracted from commit messages and source code. Therefore, it would be useful to researchers if URLs provide additional insight on project development. To assess traceability, manual topic labelling is evaluated against automated topic labelling on URL data sets. This work also shows differences between URL data collected from commit messages versus URL data collected from source code. As well, this work explores outlying software projects with many URLs in case these projects do not provide meaningful software relationship information. Results from manual topic labelling show promise under evaluation while automated topic labelling did not yield precise topics. Further investigation of manual and automated topic analysis would be useful.